The present invention relates generally to wearable sensor systems. More particularly, the invention describes a watch equipped with a series of physiological sensors configured to detect early symptoms of an allergic reaction.
About 50 million Americans have one or more allergies, with as many as 15 million having some form of food allergy. That number includes about 6 million or 8% of all children, with young children affected most. According to a study released in 2013 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food allergies among children increased by approximately 50% between 1997 and 2011. Every 3 minutes, a food allergy reaction sends someone to an emergency department—that is more than 200,000 ER visits per year. Food allergies cause an estimated $25 billion burden on the US economy every year.
Young children are not only more likely to have food allergies, they are more vulnerable to suffer greater consequences from them. This is in part due to the fact that children are less likely than adults to recognize foods that they may be allergic to. Children are also less likely to recognize early symptoms of an allergic reaction and less likely to take quick steps to manage its consequences. Novel systems and methods are therefore needed to help adults with objective recognition and notification of an onset of an allergic reaction of their child.
Another component of the problem is that an allergic reaction may not start immediately after digesting the culprit food. It may take some minutes and even hours for some allergic reactions to develop. Small children may not be easy to continuously monitor and observe. They can wonder away from adults to play in other rooms in the house or hide in a closet somewhere, thereby further complicating the task of direct monitoring of their condition by an adult. There is a need for a novel system capable of not only recognizing the early onset of an allergic reaction but also capable of assisting an adult in rapidly finding a child that needs medical attention.
Food allergy occurs when a person's immune system mistakenly treats a specific food as an invading disease, releasing histamine into a blood stream. In turn, histamine release may cause a variety of physiological reactions ranging from swelling, skin itching, hives and irritation, to excessive sweating, increase in heart rate, drop in blood pressure and even airways restriction and anaphylaxis. Frequently, the person experiencing an allergic reaction may not even realize it until the process has gone too far.
Unfortunately, early signs and symptoms of an allergic reaction are too ubiquitous to be of specific value in allergy detection. Skin redness and sweating may be caused by common environmental factors such as hot ambient temperature and high humidity or by strenuous physical activity such as running, biking or jumping—something that children often do many times a day. Monitoring for allergy may therefore be a subject of frequent false alarms, which may frustrate their caregiver to the point of making such devices useless. There is a need for a system capable of accurate detection of an onset of an allergic reaction with minimal false alarms.
Finally, early detection and notification of an allergic reaction is not useful unless it is accompanied by a rapid mitigation strategy, such as intake of an antihistamine medication or injection of epinephrine. Since such allergic attacks may not be occurring frequently, locating suitable medication may prove to be difficult and may take some time, thereby worsening the outcome. Novel systems and methods are therefore needed that will assist a caregiver with rapid location of the necessary medication so that this medication may be administered as soon as possible.